"No," rejoined the Bostonian, "but it will be, when it is as dead as Philadelphia."
CHAPTER XIX.
Journalism.—Prodigious Enterprises.—Startling Headlines.—"Jerked to Jesus."—"Mrs. Carter finds Fault with her Husband's Kisses."—Jacob's Ladder.—Sensational News.—How a Journalist became known.—Gossip.—The Murderer and the Reporters.—Detective Journalists.—"The Devil Dodged."—Ten Minutes' Stoppage in Purgatory.—French, English, and American Journalists.—A Visit to the Great Newspaper Offices.—Sunday Papers.—Country Papers.—Wonderful Eye-ticklers.—Polemics.—"Pulitzer and Dana."—Comic and Society Papers.—The "Detroit Free Press" and the "Omaha World."—American Reviews.
y his discovery of America, Christopher Columbus has furnished the Old World with an inexhaustible source of amusing novelties. You pass from the curious to the marvellous, from the marvellous to the incredible, from the incredible to the impossible realised.
But it is to American journalism that the palm must be awarded.
I shall speak later on of the Sunday papers—those phenomenal productions that fairly take your breath away.
Take the daily papers: eight, ten, sometimes twelve pages, each consisting of eight or nine columns of fine print, the whole for a penny or threehalf-pence. So much for the quantity.
The first thing that attracts your attention is the titles of the articles. The smallest bit of news cannot escape your notice, thanks to these wonderful head-lines. It requires a special genius for the work, to be able to hit upon such eye-ticklers.